


Castellum

by dakeyras



Series: Naruto Fantasy Week 2020 Oneshots [6]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Elemental Magic, Elementals, Gen, Naruto Fantasy Week, Terrorism, Terrorist Deidara, architecture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:22:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25107667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dakeyras/pseuds/dakeyras
Summary: The news anchor is visibly sweating as he reads the note he’s received live on air.“Sixteen people were injured and, tragically, four have died. The collapse of the bridge was caused by an explosive charge placed by a man using the pseudonym ‘Deidara’. Not much is known about him, although this note was recovered from the scene.”A picture of a note is briefly shown on screen. ‘Deidara, C4 on Bridge’ it says, formatted like a mockery of an artist’s attribution in a gallery.---Kurotsuchi, a mage-cum-architect, spends her career rebuilding everything Deidara has destroyed. Step by step, she gets closer to the enigmatic terrorist.
Relationships: Akatsuchi & Kurotsuchi (Naruto), Deidara & Kurotsuchi (Naruto)
Series: Naruto Fantasy Week 2020 Oneshots [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1809535
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12
Collections: Naruto Fantasy Week 2020





	Castellum

**Author's Note:**

> For Naruto Fantasy Week 2020: Prompt is 'Elemental Spirits' - I played kind of fast and loose with this one
> 
> Each submission I'm making has a different setting, style and genre.

The news anchor is visibly sweating as he reads the note he’s received live on air.

_ “Sixteen people were injured and, tragically, four have died. The collapse of the bridge was caused by an explosive charge placed by a man using the pseudonym ‘Deidara’. Not much is known about him, although this note was recovered from the scene.” _

A picture of a note is briefly shown on screen. ‘Deidara, C4 on Bridge’ it says, formatted like a mockery of an artist’s attribution in a gallery.

-O-

The woman’s voice is clipped and professional as she reels off the headlines. She begins with the biggest news story of the day.

_ “Another attack by Deidara has claimed two lives and injured seven soldiers who were manning the fortress at the time. An alchemical contraption caused what experts are calling a ‘controlled collapse’ of the main gatehouse. This marks the fourth bombing this month.” _

An on-site reporter takes over.

_ “Thanks Cathy. Experts are still baffled by the speed of the consecutive bombings. Theories abound as to how Deidara is able to travel across the country so rapidly, and without being spotted by the public. It’s unclear where he will strike next, and when – or if – he will stop of his own accord. Because for now, the police are clueless.” _

-O-

At the end of the segment on a wave of new building works across the country, the news anchor fills another thirty seconds of airtime.

_ “...And in other news, the latest Deidara bombing has demolished a small dam near Sarstedt. There were no fatalities. This continues the trend of Deidara restricting his activities to Felsland. Tune in next week for a two-hour documentary on the still-at-large terrorist and his war against the City of Stone.” _

The program cuts away to a feature about a kitten who was raised by ducks.

-O-

Kurotsuchi was an architect and a skilled mage. She had travelled through all Felsland, the name for the collection of semi-independent districts that acknowledged the City of Stone as ruler. She’d studied ancient tombs and modern high-rise buildings, built spindly bridges across streams and reinforced border fortresses bristling with cannons. She’d even been inside the top-secret government bunkers, as part of a study of bullet- and bomb-proof designs. And now it was all going to pay off.

For years now, Deidara had been creating and detonating never-before-seen chemical concoctions. With precise applications of force and flame he brought down the biggest, strongest buildings in Felsland.

There was so much repair work going around, even junior architects were in demand. Kurotsuchi knew every strike was a new tragedy, but when she was asked to design a replacement for a destroyed dam it was her big break. Sarstedt had sixteen people and two dogs living in it, but the dam was needed to support a reservoir for the entire area, supplying some 20,000 homes.

“I want the reports on all Deidara’s attacks,” she told her Counter-Terrorism Office liaison, a chubby graduate called Akatsuchi. “Some details will be classified, but get me whatever you can.”

“Sure thing, boss,” he said.

Kurotsuchi almost squealed after he left. She had  _ clearance _ now, and  _ minions _ ! In her head, designs for the new dam danced. It was well-known that Deidara liked to return and demolish any new structures that were built on the sites of his past attacks, so she had effectively limitless funds to make it as strong as possible.

She liked a challenge. Deidara had thrown down the gauntlet, and now she would defy him with all her skill and power. Her dam would last a thousand years.

Six weeks later, she stood on the building site, chalk in hand. The ground had been prepared; all that was left was for her to work her magic. She drew a vast diagram in swirling lines on the floor, then sent a pulse of mana to activate the working.

A behemoth of rock and soil dragged itself clear of the earth. “Raise a wall of solid granite, twelve feet wide at the base and six feet wide at the top, stretching from marking gamma-phi-mu to marking gamma-phi-tau, and thirty-eight feet and two inches tall,” Kurotsuchi instructed. The earth elemental set to work.

It was a strong spirit, but even so the raising of the first wall would take a few hours. Kurotsuchi pulled out her sheaf of notes again. Something about Deidara’s attacks didn’t add up. They weren’t the pointless pyromania of an explosives fetishist with no sense of art or architecture, or the bomber would have used larger explosions to destroy his targets. The previous dam went down when a small breaching charge blasted a tiny crack. Water pressure had caused the vast majority of the damage.

This wasn’t a terror attack – this was a scandal about shoddy public construction. At least, after the bombing, she had a chance to replace the terrible dam with a new, better one. It took another two days to finish up, and then she dismissed the elemental. Her new construction was a solid edifice, free of flaws and relying on strong buttresses to protect against a repeat bombing.

It took sixteen days before Deidara visited the dam in the middle of the night and blew it up again.

Kurotsuchi frantically searched through the wreckage. A postmortem revealed that the critical damage was due to a key buttress failing. The remnants of the explosive showed it had been a low-yield device. That shouldn’t have destroyed it!

She barely ate and rarely slept. Akatsuchi fussed about her, but she didn’t need care, she needed answers! At last she found the culprit – a cascade of fractures had caused fault lines to develop in the stone. The water pressure led to a racking stress on the buttress, loosening it from the rock after a few hours.

Kurotsuchi scrapped her designs, tore down the remnants of the old structure and raised a new dam from scratch. She settled on a complex series of supports, hidden in the stone, and a bound earth elemental who would repair minor damage as it occurred. Deidara was going to have to pull out a goddamn  _ nuke _ if he wanted to tear down another of her buildings.

A mere month after she placed the final brick, news came in from Sarstedt. Deidara had scorched a pair of crosses on the dam, marking the two strongest spots. There was no damage to the building itself. Kurotsuchi had never gotten flowers from a man before, but this was better than mere roses, she decided.

Those crosses represented  _ respect _ .

-O-

In Winzenburg, Kurotsuchi used six elementals to rebuild a collapsed bridge. Deidara toppled the church that stood on one bank, using its mass to demolish one of the arches. She added a gatehouse to each end of the river, guarding against attacks and also acting as a physical shield against more collapsing buildings.

Kirchbrak was straightforward – the burnt-out barracks needed new security measures against fire risks. Kurotsuchi read about the second strike by Deidara, which merely singed one of the roofs, with a wide smile on her face.

There was a cathedral in Bad Hornberg once upon a time. Deidara had destroyed it years ago, and every rebuilding attempt had failed. Most of the time, the architects and mages hadn’t even finished the walls before another overnight bomb was set off. Guards were a waste of time and money; they either saw nothing, or were found in pieces amongst the rubble. Kurotsuchi stretched her skills to the limit, finished the construction in a single day, and made it too robust for any of Deidara’s past attacks to shake.

Despite her growing fame, the work in Bahrenborstel was tiny. It took all of an hour to repair the ruined pub. Kurotsuchi chose it for the pattern it made. In her mind’s eye she saw the steady path she was cutting across the country. She knew Deidara could see it too. She felt it in her bones, and she saw his messages in the targets he chose.

Now she wanted to send a reply.

-O-

The panel show has just finished joking about a scandal that involves a minor politician. The host keeps the discussion moving.

_ “Now it’s time for the statistics round! 85% of  _ what _ are successful?” _

_ “My wife’s attempts to buy me clothes?” _

_ “Your tie must be proof of the 15% failure rate, then!” _

There’s a few minutes of back-and-forth between the panelists, before the host steps in again.

_ “Okay, I’m going to have to ask for a serious answer now.” _

_ “The answer is Deidara’s attacks.” _

_ “Specifically, Deidara’s so-called ‘second wave’ attacks, which are on sites he has hit before.” _

_ “That’s right. This is the news that the terrorist Deidara has lost his air of infallibility. Our favourite demolitionist is slipping, it seems. Some of his follow-ups attacks have left little more than cosmetic damage behind. Not to worry – I haven’t managed to perform for a follow-up since I was twenty-three! That’s one point to each team, and we’re moving on to the headline round.” _

-O-

“Another attack, this one in some backwater town.” Akatsuchi, now her permanent assistant and liaison, sounded sick to his stomach. 

Kurotsuchi looked up from her diagram. “Is it the hospital in Eberholzen?”

“Oh, have you already heard? Everything around it is in ruins and there’s heavy structural damage to the laboratories.” What did it say about Kurotsuchi that she had to fight down the urge to cheer?

“Let’s get packed up and move out,” she said, tone neutral.

Deidara, the mad terrorist bomber, had struck again. Their hidden dance had taken another step.

She grabbed her scrapbook, filled with scrawls and rambling, a lunatic map to a lunatic brain. But she wasn’t crazy now, was she? Across her desk were scattered dozens of pages of design work for the Eberholzen hospital.

She muttered to herself, under her breath. “I can  _ see  _ you. And now, you smug bastard, you’re going to find out the hard way why that’s a bad thing.”

The damage wasn’t as bad as Kurotsuchi had feared. None of the blast-resistant framework had been affected, and after the rubble was cleared, it took a mere two hours to replace the missing walls and ceilings. After so much time working with her elementals, she barely had to direct them. Strong visualisation and a halfhearted command to ‘go be useful’ tended to suffice.

More important, in her view, was the scrapbook with which she had predicted Deidara’s latest attack. Hair hanging down in lank strands, feverishly bent over a set of maps with coloured pins placed in, she knew she looked half-insane. But when the hospital was repaired, Kurotsuchi had a new destination.

She checked the building out of habit, and corrected a few parts where her elementals had worked off her subconscious rather than conscious plans. That was the one problem she’d found as her skill improved – once she gave a command, she had to take control of the elemental again to update or cancel it. Then she set her sights on Deidara’s next target.

Liebenau.

One way or another, things were going to end there.

-O-

“Why are we going to a random village in the middle of nowhere?” Akatsuchi asked as the train trundled through the countryside.

Kurotsuchi looked up from her designs. “How many more hundreds of times are you going to ask that?”

“Until I get an answer.”

“I told you, I need to study the local castle. It’s old, but the corbels are well-preserved and have an interesting mechanism for distributing load.”

He snorted. “Every time in the past, you’ve just pulled out a report or textbook or grainy picture. You’re putting off important work by heading out here – the government bunkers are being upgraded soon, and you’re guaranteed to get the job if you ask for it!”

“You didn’t have to come,” Kurotsuchi pointed out.   


They were silent for a while, and then he crossed his arms and opened his mouth. “So what’s the  _ real–” _

“Finish that sentence and I will make you ride on the roof.”

Liebenau Station and Liebenau Castle were the only buildings with more than two stories within fifty miles, as far as Kurotsuchi could tell. Finding a place to stay would be hard, but given the sums of money she could throw around, there should be a farmer willing to give them food and shelter.

Examining the corbels was an excuse, of course. Kurotsuchi needed a reason to spend lots of time at the castle, until Deidara struck next. Either she would finally meet him, or her theories would be dashed as he blew up someplace else.

“Another tourist? Here I was expecting to have the place to myself!”

Kurotsuchi jumped. A blond man with an ice lolly had snuck up on her as she took a closer look at a keystone. “I’m an architect, actually,” she said.

“That’s okay,” he replied. “I’m not a tourist either.”

A hot flush raced through Kurotsuchi as she realised who was standing opposite her, ice cream in hand.

“Deidara,” she said, inclining her head.

He grinned. “Kurotsuchi, my favourite student.” He dipped his head as well, in a parody of a bow. He was wearing a nondescript dark blue jacket and grey trousers – even though she’d expected him here, she still hadn’t recognised him. “Are you here to see my next masterwork?”

Why  _ was _ she here? “I suppose I just wanted to meet the man who taught me so much.”

“And you want to know why, I presume,” Deidara said.

“If you’re offering, sure.”

They ended up sitting in the gatehouse, sharing Deidara’s thermos of tea. Kurotsuchi was under no illusions about the danger she was in, but Deidara could have blown her to pieces on a number of occasions over the last three years. He’d done it to far more secure targets, after all. He wouldn’t need to stoop to poisoning.

“I’ve never published a manifesto. I’ve never given an interview, or even agreed to answer a single question. Before today, I always let my art speak for itself.”

“I understand.” Kurotsuchi would have to keep whatever she learned to herself.

Deidara smiled briefly. “Half of what I do is for the joy of it. But the reason I’m only active in Felsland, and that I mostly target government buildings, is because I hate the government, on a personal level. I don’t care about their politics – I just find them to be loathsome people.”

“Why not target them directly?” she asked before she could stop herself.

“You’re very eager to point a mad terrorist at the leadership of your country.” Deidara sounded approving, if anything. “But if I kill some of them, the rest will simply scurry into their holes, and hide away. And that wouldn’t do. A true test of my art is to clear out the entire rat’s nest in one stroke. And that is where you come in.”

“That doesn’t explain why you need me in particular, or what it is you want me to do.”

“I want you to ask for the government bunker upgrade job. Then I want you to leave a quarter-inch gap between two of the ceiling beams. I have a new bomb I’m going to try out, and it only needs a tiny flaw to do its work. Any gap – no matter how small – and I can kill whoever is inside.”

Kurotsuchi shook her head. “I won’t do that. I admire you, but what you’re doing is wrong. Too many have died already. You’ve taught me so much, you’ve forced me to grow and develop, but  _ this? _ I  _ can’t _ do this.”

“That’s a pity, you’re the best architect available to me. Let me know if you change your mind.” Deidara flicked a hand in a peculiar gesture and the air itself gathered around him. Kurotsuchi saw the outline of a bird before he was carried out the door and up into the sky.

Deidara travelled via air elemental. That answered a lot of questions, actually. Kurotsuchi sprawled on the steps to the gatehouse, her whirling thoughts not helped by his abrupt departure.

_ You’re the best architect available to me. _ It was a compliment, but it was also a threat. ‘Best’ rather than ‘only’ was an important distinction.

-O-

Kurotsuchi applied for the government bunker upgrade, and was awarded the contract. She couldn’t risk it falling into the hands of an architect with fewer scruples. Who else had Deidara approached? There was no way of knowing, and so there was nobody she trusted.

Feverish work by candlelight, night after night, with designs locked away for the few hours she slept each day, resulted in a bunker that looked more like a safe. Three earth elementals would be sealed into the final product, working night and day to repair any cracks caused by erosion or natural earthquakes. If any explosives were detonated nearby, they would contract the stone, closing any new gaps as fast as they were created.

It was, by all definitions of the word, a masterwork. Almost as soon as it was finished, another wave of bombings led to the entire government sequestering itself inside. As the parliament toppled, ministers and their aides filled the bunkers almost to bursting.

And then Kurotsuchi woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of bombs.

She recognised the scene from half a mile away. It was a modified fire elemental that was responsible, she saw at a glance. Placed on the hill that hid the bunkers, it was sending explosion after explosion into the ground. The series of blows had no effect, of course, but there would be more to the attack than an ineffectual flailing at perhaps the hardiest defences in Felsland.

Kurotsuchi had a good idea about who had the answers she sought.

-O-

Deidara was close by, as she knew he’d be. Their meeting had given Kurotsuchi a new insight into the way his mind worked. She kicked down the front door of an office building, closed for the night, and found her way to the top floor. A shadow was waiting for her, watching the chain of explosions in the distance. They’d been going for thirty minutes now.

“Explain. Now.”

Deidara sighed and gestured out the window, the bastard child of relief and exhaustion on his face. “I spent years shaping you into a murder weapon. Then, when the time was right, I pointed you at my target and pulled the trigger. Your earth elementals are an extension of your will – all I needed to do was reinforce the idea that ‘any gap, and I can kill whoever is inside’.” The words sound faintly mocking now. “A series of weak explosions on the surface will lead to the earth elementals obeying the last command you gave them. They will close any gaps they find, including the rooms with people in them. It’s a very slow process. It will take at least an hour for them to die, perhaps two, and it’s too late to stop things now.”

“You used me. I took you at your word and you turned me into a tool.” The words fell from Kurotsuchi’s lips like bars of lead. Her pride and joy, her favoured spells ever since she first discovered magic, had been turned against her. “But you don’t know me as well as you think.”

The room they were in was large, so there was no chance for Deidara to escape before the doors and windows sealed shut. Stone flowed over the openings, entombing the pair.

“You know,” Kurotsuchi said, as her heart raced like a hummingbird’s wing, “it’s a bit of a shame you pigeonholed me as an earth elementalist. Especially since you use fire as well as air elementals – I would have expected you to look for the same double nature in others.”

A spirit of fire danced on her outstretched hand, a candle flame to drive back the dark. As she concentrated, it brightened to a harsh white glare.

“This seems a little hasty,” Deidara said, backing up to one of the external walls. His eyes were dark smudges, the mirror of her own. “I think–”

“You’re about to try to blast a hole so you can escape,” Kurotsuchi interrupted him. “But this ends here. Either you surrender, or neither of us leaves this room alive.”

She saw it in his gaze, the exact moment he decided to make the attempt. She’d studied him until she knew him inside and out, knew his moods, his methods… and his preferred explosives. One volatile concoction in particular, which was sensitive to heat and  _ light _ . There was a good reason he operated at night.

As Deidara pulled a glass flask from an inside pocket, ready to splash some of its contents over the wall and carry out a controlled explosion, Kurotsuchi hurled her fire elemental.

The orb of brilliant light showed his shocked face clearly as it rushed towards him. It refracted off the glass flask in his hand. She never saw the spark that triggered the explosion and ended their world in fire and flame.

**Author's Note:**

> This is my current absolute favourite short story. Please let me know what you thought!
> 
> Also - none of the towns/cities are based on real places. I lifted the names off Google Maps while scrolling through a random part of Germany.


End file.
